Ann Veronica (26 page)

She groaned aloud and bowed her forehead to her knees. She floundered
deep. She wanted to kiss his feet. His feet would have the firm texture
of his hands.

Then suddenly her spirit rose in revolt. "I will not have this slavery,"
she said. "I will not have this slavery."

She shook her fist ceilingward. "Do you hear!" she said "whatever you
are, wherever you are! I will not be slave to the thought of any man,
slave to the customs of any time. Confound this slavery of sex! I am a
man! I will get this under if I am killed in doing it!"

She scowled into the cold blacknesses about her.

"Manning," she said, and contemplated a figure of inaggressive
persistence. "No!" Her thoughts had turned in a new direction.

"It doesn't matter," she said, after a long interval, "if they are
absurd. They mean something. They mean everything that women can
mean—except submission. The vote is only the beginning, the necessary
beginning. If we do not begin—"

She had come to a resolution. Abruptly she got out of bed, smoothed
her sheet and straightened her pillow and lay down, and fell almost
instantly asleep.

The next morning was as dark and foggy as if it was mid-November instead
of early March. Ann Veronica woke rather later than usual, and lay awake
for some minutes before she remembered a certain resolution she
had taken in the small hours. Then instantly she got out of bed and
proceeded to dress.

She did not start for the Imperial College. She spent the morning up
to ten in writing a series of unsuccessful letters to Ramage, which she
tore up unfinished; and finally she desisted and put on her jacket and
went out into the lamp-lit obscurity and slimy streets. She turned a
resolute face southward.

She followed Oxford Street into Holborn, and then she inquired for
Chancery Lane. There she sought and at last found 107A, one of those
heterogeneous piles of offices which occupy the eastern side of the
lane. She studied the painted names of firms and persons and enterprises
on the wall, and discovered that the Women's Bond of Freedom occupied
several contiguous suites on the first floor. She went up-stairs and
hesitated between four doors with ground-glass panes, each of which
professed "The Women's Bond of Freedom" in neat black letters. She
opened one and found herself in a large untidy room set with chairs that
were a little disarranged as if by an overnight meeting. On the walls
were notice-boards bearing clusters of newspaper slips, three or four
big posters of monster meetings, one of which Ann Veronica had attended
with Miss Miniver, and a series of announcements in purple copying-ink,
and in one corner was a pile of banners. There was no one at all in this
room, but through the half-open door of one of the small apartments
that gave upon it she had a glimpse of two very young girls sitting at a
littered table and writing briskly.

She walked across to this apartment and, opening the door a little
wider, discovered a press section of the movement at work.

"I want to inquire," said Ann Veronica.

"Next door," said a spectacled young person of seventeen or eighteen,
with an impatient indication of the direction.

In the adjacent apartment Ann Veronica found a middle-aged woman with
a tired face under the tired hat she wore, sitting at a desk opening
letters while a dusky, untidy girl of eight-or nine-and-twenty hammered
industriously at a typewriter. The tired woman looked up in inquiring
silence at Ann Veronica's diffident entry.

"I want to know more about this movement," said Ann Veronica.

"Are you with us?" said the tired woman.

"I don't know," said Ann Veronica; "I think I am. I want very much to do
something for women. But I want to know what you are doing."

The tired woman sat still for a moment. "You haven't come here to make a
lot of difficulties?" she asked.

"No," said Ann Veronica, "but I want to know."

The tired woman shut her eyes tightly for a moment, and then looked with
them at Ann Veronica. "What can you do?" she asked.

"Do?"

"Are you prepared to do things for us? Distribute bills? Write letters?
Interrupt meetings? Canvass at elections? Face dangers?"

"If I am satisfied—"

"If we satisfy you?"

"Then, if possible, I would like to go to prison."

"It isn't nice going to prison."

"It would suit me."

"It isn't nice getting there."

"That's a question of detail," said Ann Veronica.

The tired woman looked quietly at her. "What are your objections?" she
said.

"It isn't objections exactly. I want to know what you are doing; how you
think this work of yours really does serve women."

"We are working for the equal citizenship of men and women," said the
tired woman. "Women have been and are treated as the inferiors of men,
we want to make them their equals."

"Yes," said Ann Veronica, "I agree to that. But—"

The tired woman raised her eyebrows in mild protest.

"Isn't the question more complicated than that?" said Ann Veronica.

"You could have a talk to Miss Kitty Brett this afternoon, if you liked.
Shall I make an appointment for you?"

Miss Kitty Brett was one of the most conspicuous leaders of the
movement. Ann Veronica snatched at the opportunity, and spent most
of the intervening time in the Assyrian Court of the British Museum,
reading and thinking over a little book upon the feminist movement the
tired woman had made her buy. She got a bun and some cocoa in the little
refreshment-room, and then wandered through the galleries up-stairs,
crowded with Polynesian idols and Polynesian dancing-garments, and all
the simple immodest accessories to life in Polynesia, to a seat among
the mummies. She was trying to bring her problems to a head, and her
mind insisted upon being even more discursive and atmospheric than
usual. It generalized everything she put to it.

"Why should women be dependent on men?" she asked; and the question was
at once converted into a system of variations upon the theme of "Why
are things as they are?"—"Why are human beings viviparous?"—"Why are
people hungry thrice a day?"—"Why does one faint at danger?"

She stood for a time looking at the dry limbs and still human face of
that desiccated unwrapped mummy from the very beginnings of social life.
It looked very patient, she thought, and a little self-satisfied. It
looked as if it had taken its world for granted and prospered on that
assumption—a world in which children were trained to obey their
elders and the wills of women over-ruled as a matter of course. It was
wonderful to think this thing had lived, had felt and suffered. Perhaps
once it had desired some other human being intolerably. Perhaps some one
had kissed the brow that was now so cadaverous, rubbed that sunken cheek
with loving fingers, held that stringy neck with passionately living
hands. But all of that was forgotten. "In the end," it seemed to be
thinking, "they embalmed me with the utmost respect—sound spices chosen
to endure—the best! I took my world as I found it. THINGS ARE SO!"

Ann Veronica's first impression of Kitty Brett was that she was
aggressive and disagreeable; her next that she was a person of amazing
persuasive power. She was perhaps three-and-twenty, and very pink and
healthy-looking, showing a great deal of white and rounded neck above
her business-like but altogether feminine blouse, and a good deal of
plump, gesticulating forearm out of her short sleeve. She had animated
dark blue-gray eyes under her fine eyebrows, and dark brown hair that
rolled back simply and effectively from her broad low forehead. And she
was about as capable of intelligent argument as a runaway steam-roller.
She was a trained being—trained by an implacable mother to one end.

She spoke with fluent enthusiasm. She did not so much deal with Ann
Veronica's interpolations as dispose of them with quick and use-hardened
repartee, and then she went on with a fine directness to sketch the case
for her agitation, for that remarkable rebellion of the women that was
then agitating the whole world of politics and discussion. She assumed
with a kind of mesmeric force all the propositions that Ann Veronica
wanted her to define.

"What do we want? What is the goal?" asked Ann Veronica.

"Freedom! Citizenship! And the way to that—the way to everything—is
the Vote."

Ann Veronica said something about a general change of ideas.

"How can you change people's ideas if you have no power?" said Kitty
Brett.

Ann Veronica was not ready enough to deal with that counter-stroke.

"One doesn't want to turn the whole thing into a mere sex antagonism."

"When women get justice," said Kitty Brett, "there will be no sex
antagonism. None at all. Until then we mean to keep on hammering away."

"It seems to me that much of a woman's difficulties are economic."

"That will follow," said Kitty Brett—"that will follow."

She interrupted as Ann Veronica was about to speak again, with a bright
contagious hopefulness. "Everything will follow," she said.

"Yes," said Ann Veronica, trying to think where they were, trying to
get things plain again that had seemed plain enough in the quiet of the
night.

"Nothing was ever done," Miss Brett asserted, "without a certain element
of Faith. After we have got the Vote and are recognized as citizens,
then we can come to all these other things."

Even in the glamour of Miss Brett's assurance it seemed to Ann Veronica
that this was, after all, no more than the gospel of Miss Miniver with
a new set of resonances. And like that gospel it meant something,
something different from its phrases, something elusive, and yet
something that in spite of the superficial incoherence of its phrasing,
was largely essentially true. There was something holding women down,
holding women back, and if it wasn't exactly man-made law, man-made
law was an aspect of it. There was something indeed holding the whole
species back from the imaginable largeness of life....

"The Vote is the symbol of everything," said Miss Brett.

She made an abrupt personal appeal.

"Oh! please don't lose yourself in a wilderness of secondary
considerations," she said. "Don't ask me to tell you all that women can
do, all that women can be. There is a new life, different from the old
life of dependence, possible. If only we are not divided. If only we
work together. This is the one movement that brings women of different
classes together for a common purpose. If you could see how it gives
them souls, women who have taken things for granted, who have given
themselves up altogether to pettiness and vanity...."

"Give me something to do," said Ann Veronica, interrupting her
persuasions at last. "It has been very kind of you to see me, but I
don't want to sit and talk and use your time any longer. I want to do
something. I want to hammer myself against all this that pens women in.
I feel that I shall stifle unless I can do something—and do something
soon."

It was not Ann Veronica's fault that the night's work should have taken
upon itself the forms of wild burlesque. She was in deadly earnest in
everything she did. It seemed to her the last desperate attack upon the
universe that would not let her live as she desired to live, that penned
her in and controlled her and directed her and disapproved of her, the
same invincible wrappering, the same leaden tyranny of a universe that
she had vowed to overcome after that memorable conflict with her father
at Morningside Park.

She was listed for the raid—she was informed it was to be a raid upon
the House of Commons, though no particulars were given her—and told to
go alone to 14, Dexter Street, Westminster, and not to ask any policeman
to direct her. 14, Dexter Street, Westminster, she found was not a house
but a yard in an obscure street, with big gates and the name of Podgers
& Carlo, Carriers and Furniture Removers, thereon. She was perplexed by
this, and stood for some seconds in the empty street hesitating, until
the appearance of another circumspect woman under the street lamp at the
corner reassured her. In one of the big gates was a little door, and she
rapped at this. It was immediately opened by a man with light eyelashes
and a manner suggestive of restrained passion. "Come right in," he
hissed under his breath, with the true conspirator's note, closed the
door very softly and pointed, "Through there!"

By the meagre light of a gas lamp she perceived a cobbled yard with four
large furniture vans standing with horses and lamps alight. A slender
young man, wearing glasses, appeared from the shadow of the nearest van.
"Are you A, B, C, or D?" he asked.

"They told me D," said Ann Veronica.

"Through there," he said, and pointed with the pamphlet he was carrying.

Ann Veronica found herself in a little stirring crowd of excited women,
whispering and tittering and speaking in undertones.

The light was poor, so that she saw their gleaming faces dimly and
indistinctly. No one spoke to her. She stood among them, watching
them and feeling curiously alien to them. The oblique ruddy lighting
distorted them oddly, made queer bars and patches of shadow upon their
clothes. "It's Kitty's idea," said one, "we are to go in the vans."

"Kitty is wonderful," said another.

"Wonderful!"

"I have always longed for prison service," said a voice, "always.
From the beginning. But it's only now I'm able to do it."

A little blond creature close at hand suddenly gave way to a fit of
hysterical laughter, and caught up the end of it with a sob.

"Before I took up the Suffrage," a firm, flat voice remarked, "I could
scarcely walk up-stairs without palpitations."

Some one hidden from Ann Veronica appeared to be marshalling the
assembly. "We have to get in, I think," said a nice little old lady in
a bonnet to Ann Veronica, speaking with a voice that quavered a little.
"My dear, can you see in this light? I think I would like to get in.
Which is C?"